Prince of Persia plays easy like a Sunday morning

Ubisoft threw a huge party last week for its upcoming reset of the Prince of Persia series. Aside from the good food, performers dangling from great heights and hookahs, the team also had a playable version of the game there.

I took Prince of Persia for a test drive and came away with a good overall impression. As I wrote before, this project is visually impressive. Animation Director David Wilkinson and company did an amazing job creating a distinctive look that’s more defined than cel-shading and has a painterly look to it.

But visuals can only take them so far, the gameplay and the controls are what makes a good game great, and in the case of Prince of Persia, wall jumping and scaling tall heights is intuitive and easy. The game plays silky smooth almost to a fault.

Moving around is easy enough. Jump to a wall automatically send you wall walking for a few second and players have to jump before that wall walk peters out. But if that does happen, there’s no need to worry because the prince’s sidekick, Princess Elika, helps him out by magically tossing him back to safety.

The move eliminates the punishment of death for a game that’s more free-flowing. Ubisoft Montreal also decided to put this casual element in the combat. When players are about to be killed, Elika manages to save them with a well-timed magic blast. Personally, I like the use of Elika when it comes to platforming; I don’t like it when it comes to combat.

As for the fighting itself, it’s button-mashy. Players have a sword attack, which is X; a glove attack, which is B; a magic Elika attack, which is Y; and a block button which is the right trigger. There isn’t a defined combo list that I know of, but just hitting the buttons works well enough. You can do so some amazing things with the press of a button.

The battles more often than not feel like staged scenes. Players will do some platforming and stumble into a room where they will have to fight some guards or a monster. They defeat them and move on.

With a strong female character this time around, Prince of Persia has a romantic comedy-Aladdinish vibe to it. Prince is wandering around. He runs into princess who is running away from some guards. Prince follows her and there’s a bit of Han Solo to his character. He helps the independent princess and finds out that she’s running away from her father.

They enter a temple where a seal confined a demon named Ahriman. They get a little family scuffle (reminds me of my folks), and oops, the seal ends up being destroyed. All hell breaks loose and it’s up to the prince and Elika to fix the problem.

All in all, it certainly looks promising. I’m interested in the type of bond players build with the characters. I want to know how players react to Elika’s AI, and if in the end, it creates an Ico relationship. If something like that does happen, then this could be one of the better games of the year.